


carry me home

by endquestionmark



Category: Elementary, Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen, Rule 63
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-12
Updated: 2012-03-12
Packaged: 2017-11-01 20:06:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 429
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/360721
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/endquestionmark/pseuds/endquestionmark
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I'm not actually sure what fandom to put this in; suffice to say that this is how Elementary, the CBS modern-day Sherlock Holmes adaptation, would go if I was writing it.  As such I'm basing much of this off the BBC version, which is why it's in the BBC tag.  Sorry everyone.</p><p>Presenting: Magdalene Holmes.</p>
            </blockquote>





	carry me home

Magdalene Holmes; an unwieldy name, perhaps, but no more than Maggie, than Margaret or Magda or Lena or any of the diminutives, and if she’s going to have it then she’s going to use it, “Mag- _da_ -lene,” a song, a musical scale, a lilting call.  Magdalene.

In New York, no one looks strangely at a woman named Magdalene; no one looks strangely at a woman in formal wear with an umbrella even when the sun is beating down on the tourists; no one looks twice at the red soles of her shoes.  New York is the city Magdalene has been looking for all her life.

Black cars are unremarkable in New York; any other color would be ostentatious, but a black sedan pulling up to the New York Times building, the Time Warner Center, City Hall; a black sedan there is like ornamentation; it is expected.  Magdalene swings her legs out of the car and onto the sidewalk and she feels its grit from the tips of her toes through the bone of her heels and up her legs; it is the city trying to wear her down, and she stabs it back with every step.  She is constantly at war with the city; it is her way of showing love.

Sherlock Holmes sees the city as a battleground; she sees the dust and knows where it comes from, what the weather was like, who walked on it.  Magdalene prefers to let it creep into her being until she wakes up with eyes gritty with New York, with the lights, with the cars and the infinite tiny cogs that make up a city screaming forward at breakneck pace with all the lights on, leaving a trail of fire in its wake.

Magdalene looks at Sherlock and she sees a woman trying to crawl into the skin of a city; she sees a woman who watches the city whirl and plots its trajectory and graphs the parabolae of its orbits and then feels as if she knows its soul.  She catches Sherlock looking at her and she knows that Sherlock sees the city lights glimmering inside her skin, a nerve network; she knows that Sherlock will never consume the city the way she has, and it makes her - a little happy, perhaps, that she has something that Sherlock never will.

“Where to, ma’am?” Andrew says as Magdalene slips back into the car.

“Mm,” she says,  _perhaps the center of the city, perhaps the ragged edges of its sprawl, perhaps the murky riverbanks, steer my chariot true_.  “Home, I think.”


End file.
